Ask A Genius 1045: The Superheroes of TV and of ‘Reality as TV’
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/28
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: Are you familiar with the show on Prime about superheroes who are all evil assholes for the most part?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I am familiar with the show to some degree.
Rosner: All right. So they’ve got a new character this season, Sister Sage. Her superpower is that she’s the smartest person on Earth. I got excited, but she’s an asshole, just like everybody else on the show. But I was excited to see an ability I can claim to have as a superpower. So I told my wife I’m a superhero, and my wife was skeptical.
But it is weird that out of all the superpowers, being the world’s smartest person is something you could consider a superpower, at least according to this show. Nobody can have invisibility or can fly. You can be super smart. But it generally doesn’t give you as much agency as it does in comic books or on TV. Reality is a lot less bendable than in comic books. Superhero abilities are more exaggerated in comics than human abilities in reality.
Somebody like Superman has Brainiac, an evil supervillain who is the smartest person on Earth, and he’s always able to invent. He doesn’t show up much anymore, but he was around probably from the 40s through the 60s through the 80s. He could always invent a ton of stuff that could upset the normal order of things and needed a superhero to tamp it down. In reality, even the smartest people on Earth can’t easily invent things like shrink, anti-aging rays, or whatever they do in the comics. Reality is not that malleable.
So, Brainiac, if you look him up, you can find many comic book adventures in which he invents stuff that makes Superman stop. Lex Luthor is always inventing stuff. As I said, reality isn’t susceptible to that. Smartphones and social media have disrupted reality and normal life the most in the last twenty years. They’ve been disruptive, but not in a way that Superman could stop.
And we might be about to enter the era of super thinking being very disruptive to how things have been via AI. Not right now, not in the next five years, because AI sucks right now. But when AI starts delivering general intelligence, when AI starts being able to engage in productive thinking, we will see significant effects.
We already have some effects in areas like medicine, for instance. It’s not pure AI, but there’s some brute force technology where you automate the process instead of developing a theory about what drug might work. You test every single substance you can come up with, thousands of them, for activity in the direction you want. Then you find stuff without having a theory about what might work; you find out what does work. In cancer treatment, for instance, one of the least miserable ways to fight cancer is training your immune system to recognize and grab onto your particular cancer cells.
Until recently, finding a way to train your immune system to grab onto certain cancer cells has been hit and miss. But now, they’re starting to use AI to develop gene sequences that build the grabbers that can grab onto any particular cancer. So, in the next five years, we might see more breakthroughs in personalized cancer therapy because AI can build the right shape of molecules or structures to target cancer cells.
Maybe I’ve gotten it all wrong, but that’s what I understand. Anyway, we’re looking at disruption like that. Even dumb AI can generate usable art. Is that disruptive? Not super a lot, except if you’re an illustrator, then you’re fucked. But we are moving into an era of superhero thinking, of super powerful thinking that will change a lot.
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